Part 7

"Mubbe zo, mubbe no," said the Ancient, like a true peasant, glancing sideways for the first time at his visitor and quickly withdrawing his eyes again. "Thur be mar watter zome plaa-ces nor others.... Zo they tell," he concluded, for fear of committing himself. Then he added: "I ain't bin out mesel'."

"He's got rheumatics chronic," said the sister-in-law, standing by and watching them both with equal disapproval.

"Ar!" said the Ancient. "Arl ower me!"

The Canvasser despaired. He took the plunge. He said as pleasantly as he could: "I've come to ask you how you're going to vote, Mr. Layton."

"Ow I be whaat?" answered his host with a look of extreme cunning and affecting a sudden deafness as he put his left hand to his shrivelled ear and leaned towards the Londoner.

"How you were going to vote, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser, still good-humoured, but a little more rosy than before, and leaning forward and speaking in a louder tone.

"Ow I were voattun?" answered the aged Layton with a touch of indignation in his cracked tones, "I ain't voättud 'tarl yet!"

"No, no, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser, relieved at any rate to have got to the subject. "What I meant was how are you going to vote?"

"Oo! Ar!" quickly caught up the peasant. "If ye'd zed that furst orf, mebbe I'd a towd ee!" He gave another little cackle of laughter and looked into the fire.

"It is a very important election, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser solemnly. "A great deal hangs on it."

"Doän you be worritin un, young man," said the sister-in-law with a touch of menace in her tone, her arms akimbo and her attitude sturdy.

"There do be zome," began the Ancient, absolutely off his own, and, so far as the bewildered Londoner could understand, entirely irrelevantly--"there do be zome as ave a bit of money lay by, an' there do be zome as as none. Ar! Them as as none kin do without un." He laughed again, this time rather unpleasantly, and more shortly than before.

There was an awkward silence. Then in a louder voice and at a higher pitch he took up his tale again. "I mind my feythur saäying when I wor furst r'k-moinding, feythur says to me, 'Ar, you moind rooks and you get your farp'nce when Farmer Mouwen give it 'ee, and you bring it straäght whome t' me, zame as I tell ee.'"

This reminiscence concluded, the old man repeated his formula to the effect that there were some who had money laid by, others who had none, and that those who had none would have to do without that commodity. Of this sentiment his sister-in-law, by a slight nod, expressed her full approval. Her lips were firmer set than ever, and she was positively glaring at her guest.

The Canvasser began to shift uneasily. "Well, I put it straight, Mr. Layton," he said--"will you vote for Mr. Richards?"

"Ar! Ye can putt un straäght," answered the Ancient, with a look of preternatural cunning, "and ah can answer un straäght, an wow! ye'd be none wiser.... Ar! reckon t' answer any man straäght 's any man there be erebouts, naabur, nor no naabur! And zo I tell un."

"That's right," said his sister-in-law, approvingly, "and so e tell 'ee!" She was beginning to look actually threatening, but the Canvasser had not yet got his answer.

"We really do hope that we can hear you are going to vote for Mr. Richards," he said pleadingly. "The action of the Government----"

"Ar, zo I do ear say," said the old man, chuckling over some profound thought. "And Mas'r Willum e do zay thaät too, though e be tother side." He wagged his head twice with the wise subtlety of age. "Ar now, which way be I going to voät? Ar? Thaät's what many on us ud like t' know!"

The Canvasser began to despair. He kept his weary smile upon his face, rose from his chair, and said: "Well, I must be going now, madam."

"That ye must," said the old lady cheerfully.

"Don't you let un go wi'out gi'ing un some of that wa-ine," said the host, as he leaned forward in his chair and stirred the down fire with an old charred stick.

The woman looked at the Canvasser suspiciously and poured him out some parsnip wine, which he drank with the best grace in the world. As he lifted the glass he said, with an assumed cheerfulness: "Well! here's to Mr. Richards!"

"Ar!" said the old man.

The old woman took the glass, wiped it carefully without washing it, put it back into the cupboard with the bottle, and turned round to continue her occupation of fixing the stranger with her eye.

"Well, I must be gone," he said for the second time, and in as breezy a tone as he could command.

"Ar, zo you zay!" was all the reply he obtained, and he left that citizen of many years still smiling with his bony aged jaws at the down fire, and muttering again to himself that great truth about material wealth which had haunted him throughout the brief conversation.

The woman shut the door behind the Canvasser, and he was off across the fields. In the next cottage he came to he asked them which way old Layton would vote. The woman at the place answered nothing, but her son, a very tall and silent young man with a soft nascent beard, who was stacking wood to the leeward of the house, smiled secretly and said--

"Ar!"

THE ABSTRACTED MAN

I had occasion the other day to catch a train which was going to the West of England from Paddington, and I was in a taxi, which was open because the weather was clear.

Now when we came to within about a quarter of a mile of Paddington we got into a block, which was exasperating in the extreme, for my time was short, and immediately in front of me, also in an open taxi--an astonishing thing, and one I had never seen before--sat a man who though all alone yet had his back to the driver. Even in the rush of the moment I could not help being fixed and somewhat stirred by his face. It was a face of intense weariness, yet in it there was a sort of patient rest. He had a thin, straggling beard, so thin that it was composed, as it were, of separate hairs; his eyes were very hollow and long-drawn, and his eyebrows arched unduly, as though on some occasion in his life--long past and by this time half forgotten--he had suffered some immense surprise.

The expression in those eyes was one of unchangeable but meek sadness. He had a high-domed forehead, as some poets have, and he wore upon it, tilted rather far back, a dirty grey hat, soft and somewhat on one side. He had a heavy old grey overcoat upon him. He was thin. He had no gloves upon his hands, which were long and bony and very withered. These hands of his were clasped one over the other upon the handle of his umbrella. So he sat, and so I watched him; I in a fever to catch a train, he apparently no longer fighting the complexities of this world.

The block broke up and we all began to dodge past each other towards Paddington. His taxi turned into the station just in front of mine. We got out together. I was interested to note that he asked for a ticket to the same station in the same town which I was about to visit. So great was my curiosity that I did what perhaps no one should do save a servant of the State in pursuit of a criminal, that is, I deliberately watched into which carriage he got and I got in with him. The express started and we were alone together for some two hours. He sat in the opposite corner to mine, still patient and still silent. He had bought no newspaper, his hands were still clasped on his umbrella, and he looked out of the window without interest as we passed by the various degrees of sordid and unhappy life which fringe London. And when we came out into the open country he still continued to gaze thus emptily.

I was most eager to speak to him, but I did not know how to begin. He solved the difficulty for me by saying at a point where the great mass of Windsor is to be seen to the south of the line upon a clear day (and he leant forward to say it and said it in a low, rather pleading voice): "Stands out well?"

"Yes," said I.

"Stands out wonderful well!" he said again, and sighed, not profoundly, but in a manner that was very touching to hear.

When a little while later we crossed the Thames he moved his head slowly to look down at the water, and he sighed as we passed the town of Maidenhead. Then he said to me again spontaneously, "D'you often travel upon this line?"

I said I travelled upon it fairly often, and I asked him, since this appeared to strike some slight note of interest in his mind, whether he travelled upon it also. He answered, in a tone a little lower and sadder than that which he had used before and shaking his poor grey head from side to side. "Not now!... I did once.... But it was broad gauge then!" and again he sighed profoundly.

He continued upon this topic, which apparently had been one of the thin veins of interest in the mine of his heart. He told me they would never have anything like the old broad gauge again--never; and he shook his head pathetically once more. He proceeded to remember the name of Isambard Brunel, and he spoke of the Thames Tunnel and how men could go dry shod under the river. "Under the river! Dry shod from one shore to the other! Marvellous...."

Then, still on that theme, he referred to the _Great Eastern_ and said what a mighty great ship she was.

"They will never have another like her--never! No one else will ever make a ship as big as that!"

Now at this point I would have contradicted him had I known him to be a man upon whom contradiction might act as a tonic and he might have told me something about his extraordinary self. For it is certain that now-a-days ships much larger than the _Great Eastern_ and fifty times more efficient sail in and out of our harbours every hour. And I could even have told him that the _Great Eastern_ had been broken up--but I did not know that such a truth might not provoke tears in those old eyes, so I forbore.

After a little pause he continued again, for he was now fairly on the run: "Wonderful thing--steam!" and then he was silent for a long while.

I began to wonder whether perhaps he was much older than I had guessed, but in a little while he settled this for me by talking to me with some enthusiasm of Lord Palmerston. It was an enthusiasm of youth. I know not how many metaphors he did not use. Little bits of sly slang--as dead as the pyramids--peeped into his conversation as he described his hero, and he would always end a paragraph of his panegyric by wagging his head and letting his heart sink again at the reflection that such men could not endure for ever.

I gently agreed with him and talked boastfully of foreign politics (for that was the trend of his own mind apparently), but his ideas upon these were not only simple but few. He had a craze that made it very difficult to keep up, if I may use that expression, for his one obsession was the French; and though he was too patriotic to prophesy their arrival upon these shores his head shook more nervously than ever when he had turned on to that topic. However, he said, we had beaten them before and we should beat them again; and he added that it was not the same Napoleon. His mind fastened upon this relief and he repeated it several times. Then he remained silent for a while, too tired to notice the towns among which we were passing.

I asked him whether he was acquainted with the Vale of the White Horse. He told me sadly, and with the first faint smile I had seen upon his face, that he had known it years ago, but "not now." He said that when he had known it the White Horse was much more distinct and much more like a horse, and he wandered on to tell me that Swindon to-day was not at all the place it had been. This was his universal judgment of everything along the line, and for a little he would have told me that the crest of the downs had changed.

He remarked that there was no wheat in the fields, which, after all, was not surprising at this time of year, and looking at the dull earth as we passed it he assured me he could remember the time when the whole of it had been yellow with corn, and if I had said: "But not in January?" I might have compelled him to an uneasy silence, which was the last thing in the world I wished.

Perhaps what I most remarked about him as strange was his not reading. I have already said that he had bought no newspaper for himself, but he did not ask for mine. When his eyes fell upon it where it lay upon the seat they looked at it as a man looks at the cat upon the hearthrug. But he did not take up the paper, though the moment through which we were passing was not without interest--and this leads me to the way in which we parted.

We had sat for some time in silence, his old face still turned to the rapid landscape, which took on with every mile more and more the unmistakable nature of the West of England, the sharp hills, the combes, and with it all that which has something about it _Roman_, a note I never miss when I cross its boundaries. At last we drew up into the great station of the city. I opened the door for him and got out first in case he should wish to hand me his bag. But though he was feeble he took it down himself and slowly came out of the carriage backwards and with the utmost caution; when he reached the platform he gasped, with some little hint of adventure in his tone, "There!" And he told me that railways were dangerous things. So we went down the platform together, for I wished to get all the experience of him I could before we had to part. He knew his way out, and when we got into the main place of the town an enormous mob, pushing and shoving, cheering and doing all that mobs do, was filling the whole of it. For the first time since we had met I saw a look of terror in his old eyes. He whispered to me, instead of speaking, "What's all that?"

"It's only a crowd," I said. "They're good-natured enough. It's the election."

"The election?" he answered, his look of terror increasing. "Whose election? Oh, I never could abide a riot! I never could abide one!"

I assured him I would get him through without any danger, and I took his thin arm in mine, and pushed and scrambled him through to a hotel that was near and there I left him. The terror had left his eyes, but he was much weaker. I asked him if I could do anything more, but the manageress told me that she knew him and that he often came there. She was a very capable person, and she reassured me, and so I left the Abstracted Man, he telling me in a tone still low, but no longer in a whisper, that he dursen't go out until the riot was gone.

And all this shows that during an election you meet more different kinds of men and explore more corners of England than at any other time. Not until I had lost him did I remember that I had forgotten to ask him on which side of our present struggle he had formed his opinion, but perhaps it was just as well I did not. It would only have confused him.

ON THE METHOD OF HISTORY

An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.

First, the mind must grasp the inner nature of historic change, and therefore must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each successive period, as also with the general scheme of its revolution.

Secondly, the external actions of men, the sequence in dates and hours of such actions, and their material conditions and environment must be strictly and accurately acquired.

Neither of these two foundations, upon which repose both the teaching and the learning of history, is more important than the other. Each is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the establishment of truth.

History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy, and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.

Whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of truth.

A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he be not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due order and proportion; he knows not what to omit, nor what to enlarge upon among so many, or rather a number potentially infinite of, facts; and his picture will not be (as some would put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of Truth. All that he establishes by his action, and all that he confirms and makes stronger, is Untruth. And so far as truth is concerned it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to its prime factor, which is human motive.

A living man has, to aid his judgment and to guide him in the establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their acts and of his own are fully within his grasp. If he is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the present has sprung, that information of his will illumine and expand and confirm his use of present experience. If he know nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings to the aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them in the way he imagines. He will come to regard his own society--which, as a man wholly uninstructed, he might fairly though insufficiently have grasped--through a veil of illusion and of false philosophy, until at last he will not even be able to see the things before his eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have history which misconceives what were the general direction and the large sweeps of thought in the immediate and the remoter past.

This being evidently the case, one is tempted to say that a just estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in history (that is, an acquaintance with the largest possible number of facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory) is as essential to this study as is that other background of motive which has just been examined.

The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect. A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if, though he have but a vague and general sentiment of the old pagan civilisation of the Mediterranean, that sentiment corresponds to the very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair. But he cannot possess so much as a sketch of the truth if he has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexander, and of Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him.

Nor will a knowledge of facts be valuable (contrariwise, it will be detrimental and of negative value to his judgment), if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of any two events, and putting without fail in the summer what happened in winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal motive and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place.

It is, of course, a pedantic and negligible error to imagine that the knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics for instance, ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the "working" of institutions--as though it were possible to judge whether an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal of what that institution might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the necessary accompaniment of it. Facts which (to repeat) do not produce ideas, but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and revelation.